1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to network technology and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus that enables services available at the corresponding time to be quickly detected using discovered resources in a distributed service execution environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
A technique for identifying an available service after detecting resources is referred to as a ‘bottom-up technique’. In this case, a method for utilizing the specification of resources without change, upon handling information about resources at the current time, is used.
This method is disadvantageous in that a specification composed of long characters is used unchanged, and thus handling time is further increased and, a relatively large amount of network traffic occurs due to exchanged messages. Further, a technique for determining whether to use required resources using resource requirements for a desired service is referred to as a ‘top-down technique’. A conventional method related to this has difficulty in representing substitute resources for resources required by the service.
Definite resources required by the service may be found using a resource specification, but the corresponding service must be able to be executed by searching for substitute resources capable of replacing the required resources. However, there is a disadvantage in that it is difficult to flexibly and simply search for substitute resources using only a resource specification that is the conventional method.
Therefore, there is a need to solve the problems of the conventional method, that is, a long processing time, a large amount of network traffic, and difficulty in detecting suitable substitute resources, in the procedure for detecting an available service using discovered resources and in the procedure for searching for substitute resources for resources required by each service.